Buy it... if you like punishing yourself and your wallet by collecting spare
jewel cases the expensive way.

Avoid it... if you agree that mundane, aimless horror scores with no
originality or intelligence are far too frequently employed in substandard movies
these days.

EDITORIAL REVIEW

FILMTRACKS TRAFFIC RANK: #871

WRITTEN
10/27/01, REVISED 2/12/09

BUY IT

Beltrami

Joy Ride: (Marco Beltrami) Just in time for Halloween in 2001,
a horror flick about a teenage summer vacation excursion gone awry was released.
Does that strike anybody else as poorly timed? Either the production of the film
was delayed (courtesy Osama bin Laden?) or someone working one late night in the
studio suddenly realized that Joy Ride was going to be such a terrible film
that nobody would notice or care about the apparent error. Likely, it was the
latter. The cliche-ridden tale involves a college freshman, his dorky brother, and
his dorky girlfriend, all of whom decide to cruise dusty rural roads and harass a
trucker known only by his CB handle. As fate would have it, of course, the trucker
becomes irritated and decides to break a couple of minor traffic safety laws while
gaining his crazed revenge. What great joy! Even if you can set aside the fact that
Joy Ride is a dumbed-down teenager version of Steven Spielberg's classic
film The Duel, then perhaps you still would have been deterred by the fact
that movies like this seemed to be produced only for the purpose of spawning
terrible music, whether original or in song compilations. It was just another
unfortunate substandard entry in the career of a man who seemed at the time to be
filling his resume with a long list of terrible stinkers. It's safe to say that in
the case of Joy Ride, Marco Beltrami either needed the money or was immune
to the infectiously poor quality of the films on which he worked early in his
career. Making a living out of scoring poor horror flicks is one thing, but never
even trying to do anything original with the genre is another matter, and a
baffling one at that. As much as some listeners may dislike the mass of Christopher
Young's music for B-grade horror films, he at least attempts (on many occasions) to
do something original with his orchestration or themes, giving the work a
personality or sense of style. Beltrami, with the exception of a minority of the
material in the Scream franchise, tended not to provide anything that could
not have been predicted by the listener. His music is just as full of tired cliches
and boring constructs as the films he scored. The talent is there, but the
incentive or will isn't. In sum, in the event that you don't want to waste your
time by reading further, the score for Joy Ride is an unequivocal failure
that leaves you scrambling for any alternative with even a hint of
intelligence.

There is no memorable construct with which to anchor Joy
Ride, no thematic development, and no minor motif that repeats for a period of
time longer than a single cue. There is no consistency, no harmony, and no
synthetic creativity. For a score with so much electronic clanging and thumping,
one would think that Beltrami would utilize samples of automotive effects to match
the story. But no, and as a matter of fact, the dull effects are mixed so that they
sound as though they're echoing underwater. Once again, it doesn't make sense for
the context. Some of the slight electrical zapping sounds place this work in the
science fiction genre. The meandering combination of these mundane atmospheric
tones is not intolerable in all of the cues, with the exception of the laughable
duo of trashy tracks that concludes the album. The moments of unbearable noise are
held to a minimum, but the score attempts to fill space with simply nothing more
than a series of wandering orchestral hits (like the one that shatters the
conclusion of "Sitchiation") and slowly alternating minor key chords. If you
quietly shift between minor third progressions enough times, yes, people will get
the idea that something creepy is supposed to be happening on the screen. Choppy
strings, brass blasts, and pounding timpani make the orchestral passages of this
stylistically low budget score even more cliched than it needed to be. Beltrami
goes further and does a few things with the score that make the product practically
laughable. His employment of twitching strings in "Charlotte's Web," as mentioned
above, is a meager imitation of Bernard Herrmann's classic style of Psycho
and Cape Fear. The insufferable "Mole Asses" is not only synthetically
obnoxious, but bursts into an awkward steal of the Mongolian music from Jerry
Goldsmith's The Shadow. The final track on the album, "Refreshify," complete
with nonsensical dialogue and cute synthesizer effects, is a neat method of poking
at the listener with a sharp object after subjecting him or her to a full half hour
of mind-numbing slop. It's hard not to have extreme disdain for this music when
you've heard so many cheap variations on the same idea, and especially when
considering that Beltrami had shown signs of greater talent in the past and was
wasting his time with assignments such as Joy Ride. There is absolutely no
reason to recommend this album to any film score collector; it is arguably the most
boring, underdeveloped, and unoriginal score of 2001. Only by the grace of a new
musicians' union agreement in Los Angeles regarding re-use fees did trash like this
exist on album. *@Amazon.com: CD or
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Bias Check:

For Marco Beltrami reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.72
(in 25 reviews)and the average viewer rating is 2.79
(in 17,100 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.